


A Very Funny Proposition (After All)

by Polexia_Aphrodite



Series: Gone for Soldiers [7]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: BAMF Maria Hill, F/M, Independent Avengers, Intuitive Bucky, Natasha Feels, Nick Fury Lies, Repressed Natasha, Steve and his guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-22
Updated: 2013-07-22
Packaged: 2017-12-21 01:30:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/894200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polexia_Aphrodite/pseuds/Polexia_Aphrodite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wonders if she’s even capable of telling him what he means to her. She wonders if she really <i>is</i> broken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Very Funny Proposition (After All)

**Author's Note:**

> Like a lot of this story, this is really a bunch of vignettes strung together. Hopefully it seems coherent enough.
> 
> Also, I realize that I'm probably taking some artistic liberties with Catholicism. Hopefully it's nothing too egregious.
> 
> Hope you all like it.

Natasha has come to despise Fury’s briefings. The ones he gives just to their little team are bad enough, but the briefings that include fifty other hand-selected S.H.I.E.L.D. agents are worse. They’re interminable and dull, and, in the course of a single morning, Fury somehow manages to make larceny, murder, and terrorism sound humdrum and tedious.

She spends most of this morning’s meeting watching her teammates through the crowd. She sees how Tony plays games on his phone, how Bruce tries not to fall asleep with his head in his hand, and how Clint rolls his eyes and stares out the window.

It always gives her a pang of regret to see Clint, though anymore their interactions are limited. The truth is that she misses him, misses the easy companionship they used to share, even as she realizes that that’s probably gone forever. She knows that it was her own callousness with his feelings that drove him away, and, with Steve next to her and James sitting in the row behind him, the thought of that fills her with a sinking dread.

At the first break, Natasha sidles up to Steve next to the coffee cart. The room is full of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, so it’s not too obvious when she leans against him ever so slightly, her arm brushing against his. She’s been sitting next to him all morning, but the warm, subtle press of his side against hers does something to ease the ache inside her.

The briefing is set to last all day, but at the second break Natasha pulls Steve out of the room, down two different elevators, through the lobby, and onto the street. They move so fast, no one seems to notice their exit, even Bucky. After a few turns, Steve realizes they’re going to her building. They’ve spent so much time at his place in Brooklyn, Steve had almost forgotten that she still had an apartment in Manhattan.

She leads him up five flights of stairs and pushes him inside her door. He barely has time to think before she’s all over him, hands in his hair, tongue in his mouth, and all he can do is grab her by the waist and lift her against his chest to give her more access.

She’s made some changes since the last time he was here: she’s added a brass-barred headboard, a short bookcase, and a chair. But it’s still as Spartan as it’s always been, just like she likes it.

She doesn’t give him much time to take in the new scenery, though. The curve of her hips fills his hands, and before long he’s pressing hard against his zipper, his breathing growing ragged, his eyes turning glassy and bright.

“I don’t know how much time you think we have until Fury figures out we’re gone,” he gasps, pulling himself away from her, “but I don’t think it’s enough time to do this justice.”

She groans against the side of his neck, “Who cares. I’ve missed you.” 

He looks down at her. “I’ve been here all along.”

Her brow furrows and she turns serious. “You know what I mean. I miss _just_ you.”

Her arms tighten around his neck and his heart swells. He hates to admit it, but it’s been a while since he felt like she was his girl.

He lets her lead him to her long-unused bed, lets her strap his wrists to her headboard with his belt and have her way with him. She teases him mercilessly with her hands and mouth, taking pride in the way his prone body tenses and bucks underneath her and, perhaps, taking too much pleasure in having him all to herself.

When she finally sinks down onto him, hot and slick and tight, leaning over him with her face close to his, he begs – _begs_ – her to untie him. When she does, when he gets his hands on her, he fights hard to keep control, and she goads him into letting go.

Afterwards, he pulls her against his chest, one big hand cradling her head while they both catch their breath.

“Do you do this with him, too? Alone?” He cranes his neck and looks down at her hesitantly, then presses on, “It’s…It’s okay if you do, I just—“

“I don’t,” she interrupts.

He looks at her for a long moment, then nods, pretending to understand.

“I’m sorry,” he says, quietly and too respectfully, “I shouldn’t have asked. It’s not my business.”

Her gorge rises. She frowns and grabs the back of his neck, forcing him to meet her eyes. She tries to keep the hard edge out of her voice.

“Listen. I know what he means to you. It’s the same for me. But he and I are not the same as you and me. I’m not going to do this with him. Just you. Understand?”

He tells her he does, tells her it doesn’t matter anyway. She sees what he thinks he’s doing: taking what he can get and pretending like it’s enough. She bristles; she hates the thought of him not knowing that he already has all of her. But the words she wants to say still stick in her throat. She wonders if she’s even capable of telling him what he means to her. She wonders if she really _is_ broken.

“I love you,” he tells her, as though he senses her struggle, “I love you,” and then it’s coming out of him in a torrent of unstoppable words. He chants it over and over while her hands run up and down his arms and her fingers trace his cheekbones, while his mouth travels from her jawline to her throat and back.

“Let’s just sleep for a little while,” she says when his voice has gone hoarse. Her arms are loose around his shoulders; his fingers are tracing the curved line of her waist.

He smirks, “It’s eleven in the morning. We can sneak back in when they all come back from lunch.”

She rolls her eyes at him and explains, with words and hands and lips that they aren’t going back. And he gives in, because he always does, for her.

*

Bucky and Steve and Natasha have become a team. They work well together, and even Fury sees it. But he still has no compunctions about splitting them up.

It’s June when Steve gets sent back to Berlin for a month, and Bucky and Natasha are left alone in his apartment. They try sleeping together – just sleeping – but they both know it doesn’t work without Steve. They spend the evenings together, but Natasha goes back to her place in Manhattan at the end of the night. In the weeks before Steve left, her apartment had been the site of countless trysts, and she likes sleeping in a bed that still smells like her and him.

It’s their third week alone together when Bucky finally brings it up – the change he’s seen between him and her and her and Steve, the shift that’s happened between all of them in the past few months. He can tell that something’s brought them closer, and he guesses (correctly) that they’ve been meeting up without him. It doesn’t bother him like he thought it would, because he knows now, with no doubts, that they love him. He knows that he has a place in their lives, whatever it may be.

Bucky and Natasha spend another summer watching the sun set from Stark Tower, even if they have to start the season without Steve. It’s a warm evening, one of the first really warm evenings of the summer, and the two of them sit side-by-side, splitting a cigarette and taking occasional swigs from Bucky’s flask. He looks over at Natalia. Her pale skin glows pink and orange in the fading light. He tells her what he’s seen and sensed. She denies nothing.

“Whatever they did to us back at – back then, whatever they made me do, I loved you,” he says, and she looks over at him with unreadable eyes, “I really did.”

Her jaw clenches. “So did I.”

He smiles at her fondly and swings an arm (his real arm) around her, resting it on the back of the bench behind her. The simplicity of this - his understanding, his acceptance – makes Natasha smile. If nothing else, James has always been good at understanding people, and knowing what they want. 

“So, you and Steve. When’s the happy day to be?”

Natasha rolls her eyes and looks back at the skyline. “It’s not like that.”

Bucky scoffs, “So you aren’t in love with him?”

She glares at the horizon. She knows exactly what he’s trying to do – get her to admit to something she can barely admit to herself.

He shifts closer to her, leans his head close to hers, and whispers, “You forget I know what Natalia Romanova looks like when she’s in love.”

She looks up at him sharply, almost shocked by his invocation of the girl she had been when he first knew her, when he trained her and loved her and made love to her. But before she can say anything more, he tells her that he’s signed the lease for the empty apartment two floors down from Steve’s.

She frowns at the news, but he just grins, bumps her hip with his, tells her they’ll be neighbors, and tells her, with a lascivious wink, that she and Steve can borrow a cup of sugar anytime. He finally coaxes a smile out of her, and they sit together in silence until the world has gone dark around them.

When Steve comes back, Natasha tells him, and he accepts it with his usual quiet grace. She knows he’ll miss Bucky, even though he’ll still be close. She knows that, since he came back, he finds it hard to meet the end of things, no matter what they might be. 

She hopes she’ll be enough.

*

Steve disappears every Sunday morning. He pulls himself out of bed before she’s awake, dresses, and leaves, sometimes for nearly the whole day. Every once in a while, Natasha senses him go, feels the rock of the mattress as he gets up or suddenly misses his warmth by her side.

When she picks up on the pattern, she rises quietly behind him one morning and trails him, though she doesn’t know exactly why. When she follows him onto the subway, into the city, and all the way to the steps of St. Patrick’s, she’s dumfounded. She feels silly for pursuing him, when the answer was so obvious. 

She stands in the back, in the shadows, and watches him. A few people recognize him, and he smiles and shakes their hands graciously, but he sits alone. He knows what to say and when to say it, right along with the crowd. He knows when to cross himself and when to kneel. But when the rest of them rise and form a single line to receive communion, he stays in his seat.

It’s archaic and arcane and nothing she’s ever believed in. But even from a distance, she sees how it comforts him. Sees how his shoulders soften. Sees how he spends more time looking at the vaulted ceilings and stained glass than at the deacon. She wonders if he’s admiring the architecture or looking for God.

As the congregation files out, she doesn’t hide anymore. She posts herself by the door, arms crossed, one eyebrow arched, until he spots her and smiles, unsurprised. He comes up to her with his hands in his pockets. His hair’s neatly combed and he’s wearing a tie; he looks like a choirboy, and nothing at all like the man Natasha knows him to be.

He tells her he’s starving and leads her out onto the street and a few blocks over, into a café they’ve been to before. He orders his usual three breakfasts and she asks for black tea and toast.

“So. Church,” she starts when their food arrives.

He kind of laughs and shrugs. “I guess so.”

“Why that church?” she asks as Steve tears through his eggs, “Why not any of the churches in Brooklyn?”

He gives her an evaluative look, like he’s wondering if he should answer or not. 

Finally, he puts down his fork, looking out at the street to his right, squinting in the sunlight.

“My mother liked it there. Thought it was beautiful. She wished we could live in the city so we could go there all the time.” He drops the “r” on “mother,” like it’s the one word he’s kept his childhood accent for. “Plenty of money for the subway now, so…” he trails off, avoiding her eyes.

He’s never talked about his mother before, or his childhood, and suddenly the conversation, hell, the whole morning, seems too intimate, like they’ve entered uncharted territory. When they pulled him out of the ice, she saw the old photos, the old records, and she knows well enough where he came from, how he was different. She can’t let the past matter, not hers and not his, so she tries not to think about it: what he was like long before he was hers. 

But suddenly it’s all she _can_ think about.

“Why didn’t you take communion with the rest of them?” It’s starting to feel a little like an interrogation, and maybe it is.

He shrugs again, too casually, “You gotta be in a state of grace.”

Her back straightens and her brow furrows. The implication sets her on edge. “Which is what, exactly?”

He looks up at her a little guiltily, “Just a Catholic thing.” He rolls his eyes and grins, and she knows that means he doesn’t want to talk about it.

Later, on the walk back, she pulls him into an empty alley and backs him up against a brick wall. Her hands wrap around his shoulders, the strength of her arms pulling him down towards her. He half expects her to be fiery, full of violent, bottomless passion, like she always is, but she’s never what he expects her to be. 

She kisses him like she hasn’t kissed him since the beginning, back when they hadn’t done anything but kiss. It’s long, slow, and lingering. She’s warm in his arms; her hair slides through his fingers like silk. It makes his head spin.

She pulls him close, pulls his face close to hers. She knows what she’s going to do, the thing she’s known she would do from the moment she followed him out of that church, and an irrational terror sweeps over her. 

“I _love_ you.”

Her heart races and her fists clench. Because _shit_ she’s doing this all wrong, and how _dare_ she say that to him in a dark backalley that smells like piss and garbage and she can’t tell if it’s been seconds or minutes or hours since she said it, but he hasn’t said anything back yet and that can’t be a good thing.

He just looks at her for a long, torturous moment, searching her face, searching for words. Suddenly it seems like it’s been a long time since anyone’s said that to him. 

“Me too,” he finally manages, and his voice is quiet and awed, like he can’t believe any of this is happening to him, “I love you, too.”

She breathes a sigh of relief and smiles, soft and close-lipped. She looks at him so fondly and intimately, he feels like his heart might burst. “I know.”

Before she lets him out of her grip, before they step back into the light of day, she yanks off his tie, unbuttons the top button of his shirt, and combs her hands through his hair.

*

Fury calls Steve and Natasha into his office, and it feels like being called to the carpet. It feels familiar.

Fury gestures to a spread of magazines on the desk in front of him: glossy trash splashed with long-lens photos of Steve and Natasha sitting on a park bench, his hand on her knee, their heads close together.

Steve raises an eyebrow. “You lettin’ the gossips get to you, Sir?”

Natasha smirks and picks one of the magazines up, flipping through their photo spread with an appraising look on her face. The photographers haven’t caught anything more than a few whispered words and clandestine touches; as Steve’s fame has risen, they’ve been careful to manage themselves in public.

Fury smiles grimly. “Not exactly. The Council is more worried about this.” He turns to a screen mounted to the wall, raises a remote, and starts a video. It’s a clip from one of the odious, hysterical news programs Steve hates: a suit-clad anchor has himself worked up into a frenzy, practically foaming at the mouth, about the implications of Captain America’s apparent relationship with a Soviet spy. He spews a lot of nonsense about state secrets and the Cold War and Bolshevism, until Natasha asks Fury to turn it off.

A long pause follows. Finally, Fury clears his throat.

“I’m shipping you two out ‘til this blows over, to Paris where they could give a damn about _Captain America_ ," he sneers, "We’ve got our eye on an art smuggling ring.”

“What about Agent Barnes?” Natasha asks in a low voice.

Fury tells them Bucky is already halfway to Buenos Aires with Maria Hill and Clint.

The looks they give him are matching and mutinous, but he just hands them briefing packets and dismisses them.

*

In Paris, they’re both relieved to know that they still make a good team. With Natasha as his more sympathetic foil, Steve plays a surprisingly effective “bad cop,” though at his size and with the right tone of voice, it’s easy to be intimidating.

With the worst of the villains they capture, Steve doesn’t mind being menacing, doesn’t mind threatening them until they fold. But with lesser thugs, men and women who have fallen in with a bad crowd, Steve hates it. He tells Natasha that it makes him feel awful to yell at them and make them cower, but they always get the information they need, so the formula stays the same.

Whenever it happens, though, whenever Steve is called upon to intimidate and frighten, later, when they’re back at the tiny Left Bank flat S.H.I.E.L.D. set them up in Natasha handles him with an unrelenting gentleness. She lets him fix her dinner and make love to her slowly. Because she knows that what he needs after that is a reminder that he isn’t a bully; that he’s still the good man he once promised to be.

*

Buenos Aires is sticky-hot and in between firefights all the three of them can do is lie in front of rickety fans with cold glass bottles of Coke. The drug ring Bucky, Clint, and Maria are tailing keeps them on their toes, though, and they get enough action to satisfy their more pugnacious appetites. 

After he’s spent two weeks watching her shoot and fight, threaten and interrogate, Maria piques Bucky’s interest. He’s always had a weakness for beautiful, bossy, brassy women who know their way around a gun. He and Steve have a lot in common that way. 

The first time he kisses her, she punches him; nearly knocks his lights out. But if the Red Room taught him anything, it was to pick up on tells, and the split second when Maria leaned into him, her lips moving ever so slightly against his, tells him everything.

He saves her life – pulling her out of the way before one of the drug syndicate’s goons can open fire – and she repays the favor twice over. It’s at the end of a long day, when the three of them are exhausted, drenched in sweat and covered in scrapes and bruises, after Clint retires to his hotel room with a grunt for a goodbye, when Maria flips the script on him. 

She pulls him into her room, grabs him by the shirt and yanks his mouth down to hers. It knocks Bucky senseless for a moment – the hot slide of her tongue against his, and the shameless, wanton promise in her eyes. There’s nothing soft or tender about what follows, but somehow it’s just what Bucky needs – to fuck and be fucked. And afterwards, when Maria gives him a gruff command to stay put and fall asleep beside her, well. 

Sometimes even the Winter Soldier can take orders.

*

They’re back in New York, when Steve watches Natasha take a bullet to the gut. He’s seen something like it once before: during the war, he saw a twenty-two year old corporal take a hit in almost the exact same spot. But he refuses to let himself think about that, because that soldier died, and Natasha _isn’t_ going to. She isn’t.

The attack came as a surprise. Their intelligence hadn’t told them that the warehouse they were sent to investigate would be filled with armed gunmen. Steve barely gets her out before they’re both riddled with more bullets. If Natasha hadn’t had the presence of mind to immediately call for backup from the team – Tony, Bruce, Clint, and Bucky – they might not have made it out at all.

Steve knows it isn’t the first time she’s been shot – he’s seen the scars on her shoulder and left thigh – but he can’t stop cursing himself for not being quicker, for not pushing her out of the way or taking the hit for her. She’s in surgery for hours, and Bucky sits beside Steve in the waiting room, his hand on his shoulder. When Clint joins their vigil, Steve’s too grief-stricken to think much of it, but the three of them exchange curt, masculine nods and sit together in silence.

S.H.I.E.L.D.’s medics stitch her back together, and Natasha’s laid up in their hospital ward for weeks, halfheartedly fending off Steve’s attempts at nursing her. She lets him adjust her pillows and bring her tea. Once, she lets him stay in the room while her bandages are changed, but when she sees how it makes his jaw clench and his hands ball into fists, she orders him away whenever the task repeats.

She’s still in the hospital when Tony, Bruce, Bucky and Clint pull Steve away from her, out into the hospital corridor, and tell him to come away with them. Steve tries to argue that someone should stay with Natasha. Bucky gives him a dark, serious look and volunteers to stay behind.

The three men march Steve out of headquarters and over to Stark Tower. At Tony’s command, JARVIS pulls up a series of documents on an oversize computer screen. Steve takes a long moment to take it all in: S.H.I.E.L.D. knew about the men in the warehouse – _Fury_ knew – and sent them in anyway, with no warning. 

Blood boils in his veins. For the first time since Bucky fell, he feels downright _murderous_. He looks up at Clint, and sees the same look in his eyes.

“Fury set us up.”

Clint gives him a nod.

Steve looks at Tony and Bruce, “What do we do now?”

Tony flashes a sardonic grin. “We start over.”


End file.
